“Warden” is the expedition’s name for the family of machines that controls access between sectors of the Rift. It covers the ten guardian profiles that hold the tenth floor of each sector, and possibly the control logic that directs common units. It is not clear whether the Wardens were built by one maker or assembled from salvaged systems over centuries.
The name is also used for one specific guardian, the Warden of the Frozen Reactor, the first machine to which crews applied it.
# What they do
The Wardens do not guard territory in a human sense. They do not hold ground, take prisoners or pursue retreating vehicles. They test a moving platform, adapt to its weapons and call reinforcements when it crosses a threshold. A guardian that has fought one loadout will be harder against the same loadout on its next echo.
Every sector boundary is held by a guardian, and every guardian holds a route key: access data the carrier’s coupler needs to anchor to the next sector. Whether the Wardens are protecting that key, or simply happen to be the place where it is stored, is not known.
# Purpose
Three readings of the Warden system are current at Asterion:
- Containment. The Wardens exist to keep something in.
- Maintenance. They keep the shaft working and treat the carrier as damage.
- Immune response. They react automatically to an unfamiliar power source, and learn its shape. See Ilyan Venn’s notebook.
The machines never explain themselves. No guardian has ever transmitted on any frequency Asterion can decode. One exception is under review: the final packet of the blackout passed through a relay segment that, at that moment, was within range of the Heart.
# Known guardians
BOSSCrusher
BOSSStormweaver
BOSSWarden
BOSSBroodmother
BOSSMagnetic Sentinel
BOSSInferno
BOSSGlacier
BOSSOverlord
BOSSVoid Phantom
BOSSHeart of the RiftRelated articles
ARCHIVE RECORDRift machines: an overviewHow the expedition classifies the machines of the Rift: maintenance, haulage, courier, control, support and guardian frames.
ARCHIVE RECORDEcho sectorsWhy the hundred mapped sectors repeat ten environments and ten guardian patterns, and why no echo is a perfect copy.WORKING THEORYExpedition theoriesThe immune response, the archive, the builders and the Heart: four ways of explaining the Rift, and the evidence for and against each.
ARCHIVE RECORDHeart of the RiftSector 10. The deepest mapped region and the source of the strongest shard signal. The Heart may be a machine, an entity, or the anomaly itself.